Obstructive sleep apnea detection using ecg-sensor with convolutional neural networks

In recent years, AI(Artificial Intelligence) has achieved great development in modern society. More and more modern technologies are applied in surveillance and monitoring. Healthcare monitoring is growing ubiquitous in modern wearable devices, such as a smart watch, electrocardiogram (ECG) necklace, smart band. Many sensors are attached to these smart devices to record and monitor physiological signals caused by activities, and then propagated those recorded electrical data to be further processed to give health diagnosis, disease prevention or making a distress call automatically. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder with a high occurrence in adult people and observed as an autonomous risk factor for circulatory problems such as ischemic heart attacks and stroke. Numerous traditional neural network based methods have been developed to detect OSA, where these methods however could not provide the intended result because they rely on shallow network. In this paper, we propose an effective OSA detection based on Convolutional neural network. Our method first extracts features from Apnea-Electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings using RR-intervals (time interval from one R-wave to the next R-wave in an ECG signal) and then CNN model having three convolution layers and three fully connected layers is trained with extracted features and applied for OSA detection. The first two convolution layers are followed by batch normalization and pooling layer, and softmax is connected to the last fully connected layer to give final decision. Experimental results on extracted feature of Apnea-ECG signal reveal that our model have better results in terms of performance measure sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. It is expected that the related technology can be applied into smart sensors, especially wearable devices.